4 ms·

This famous roboticist doesn’t think Elon Musk understands AI

28 points by ehudla 9y ago

chmaynard 9y ago
This is getting absurd. An interview with Dr. Rodney Brooks, one of the great minds working in CS and robotics, has to spend time rebutting uninformed claims and fear mongering about AI research. There is so much Brooks can teach us. I look forward to reading his book.
cs2818 9y ago
Really glad to hear this perspective. Over the past seven years most of my time has been spent in robotics research labs, and I really struggle to reconcile the state of research with the concerns of those like Elon Musk. I think a series of discussions between the major figures on each side of this would be really valuable.
Houshalter 9y ago
And Brooks doesn't understand Musk. He's not saying current AI is a threat. He's talking about the very long term future. What AI will be like in 30 years, or even further. Its inevitable we will eventually solve AI. And when that day comes it will be dangerous. How easy do you think it is to control a being thousands of times smarter than you? If it was invented today we would have no ability to control it. Our best AI control mechanisms are just pressing a button to reward or punish it for it's behavior. You can't imagine any way that would fail? Our slightly larger brains made the difference between swinging in trees and walking on the moon. But we are only the very first intelligence to evolve. Its unlikely we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible. And this will likely happen in our lifetimes. The median expected date estimated by AI researchers is in the 2040s. Sure they can't possibly predict it very well, but who else can? And there is something to the wisdom of crowds.
- cbames89 9y ago
  Why is super-human general AI inevitable? Do you have references for this 2040 date? I'd love to see who's making this prediction.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    Because there's nothing magical about the human brain. Evolution created it through just dumb mutation and selection. Under a bunch of ridiculous constraints. Like it had to use less than 10 watts of power, and weigh only a handful of pounds, and it had to be made of meat, and could only be iteratively improved from whatever happened to work at guiding locomotion in fish, etc. Our current transistor tech is already orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and more efficient than neurons. There's no reason to expect the software stats of the brain are much better. Here's one survey: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf
    - thanatropism 9y ago
      Interestingly, about 18% of the researchers said "never", but these answers didn't influence the posted CIs. Any reasonable imputation (say, "never = 2350") would both stretch those intervals by a lot and still underestimate the expert consensus.
      - Houshalter 9y ago
        They did account for them in the median AFAIK. Which is the number I gave and the most appropriate metric. I don't see any mention of confidence intervals mentioned in the survey, so what are you talking about? Means and standard deviation are given. But they are mostly useless as the distribution is very skewed. They would be infinite if the "never" people were included of course.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      The problem isn't just emulating the IQ of a typical human brain - which is a low bar, for the most part - but creating a transcendentally smart general intelligence. Considering that we still have many issues with basic computing - not least working out how to write code that works reliably without constant manual updates - the suggestion that we're going to start building self-improving crash-proof hyperbrains any time soon is wishful thinking. Realistically, we don't have the first clue how to start solving that problem. As of 2017 "Throw deep learning at it" is more of a fashion statement than a practical solution.
tbabb 9y ago
This guy is smart, and dead on: - People who don't understand AI are afraid of it; those who do know how fragile and limited it is. - The call for "regulation" of technology that doesn't exist is too vague to be useful. - It's the AI in self-driving cars which has the most potential to immediately kill/save thousands of people, and it's telling that it's not this technology that Elon seems to be calling to be regulated. Whether or not regulation is the right thing to do, any argument for/against regulation of self-driving cars could be applied just the same to a hypothetical super AI, but the former is tied to real, practical problems which exist today. Brooks clearly knows what's up. Also, to add my own commentary: - The dystopian robot future we should all be afraid of is not the [paperclip maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) Musk and friends wave their arms about, but marketing/business algorithms that have ripple effects at the scale of societies-- the Facebook, YouTube, and Google ranking algorithms are examples of this. We could shortly be in a place where large scale human behavior is shaped by algorithms with more data and insight about collective human behavior than any single human could have, and it will be used to optimize for money making instead of stability, fairness, or cultural values. Some society-shaping decisions/policies could even be made without any human awareness of the reasoning behind them. This is not less scary if they're being made by fragile/flaky algorithms.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Exactly. Our lack of awareness of political, social, and economic consequences is far more of a problem than any hypothetical paperclip demon. AI isn't terrifying. AI built with our current values is an horrific prospect.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - cirgue 9y ago
    You don't need AI to have a paperclip demon. You just need complex systems that impact people's lives and aren't well understood. Capitalism is arguably the example of the paperclip deamon, and that will not get better with the permeation of sophisticated, fragile, poorly tuned machine learning techniques.
cbames89 9y ago
Does anyone else find it telling that at the same time Musk called for regulation, Steve the security robot is raging across the internet? http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/18/537905142/when-robot-face-plants-in-fountain-onlookers-show-humanity-by-gloating?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170718 http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/18/537905142/...
Aron 9y ago
To me, Elon is playing catch-up and thrown his hat in the Yudkowsky club although Bostrom and other more credentialled people were probably his vector into it. They were talking about this stuff 10-20 years ago. I haven't yet seen anything where Elon moves the ball forward conceptually, although he's a doer so he's not messing around with writing futurism documents and nitpicking details of rationality that almost no one is actually capable of implementing. On the other hand, Brooks doesn't show any indication he knows what Musk is talking about and throws out a bad summary of his position. I got nothing from this article except a slightly lower respect for Brooks. The real minds to watch IMO is the Hinton + Deep Mind crew, and I think Yudkowsky and the fearmongers are largely correct, or at least correct enough to be taken seriously. I don't think people following the meme 'real AI researchers know that AI is limited and fragile' are on the right track. So that's my bias.
- latently 9y ago
  "On the other hand, Brooks doesn't show any indication he knows what Musk is talking about" Not quite true: "Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon?"
natch 9y ago
People who think they understand AI don't understand AI. Which I think is a big part of Elon's point. So criticizing Elon this way is rich.
borplk 9y ago
"AI" is the "flying cars" of our generation.
anth1988 9y ago
I think he understands fine, but he likes getting his name out there as an AI alarmist more. > Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon? By the way, let’s talk about regulation on self-driving Teslas, because that’s a real issue. hahaha This interview should be required reading for everyone who wants to talk about AI. > It’s why I’m right now writing a book on AI and robotics and the future — because people are getting too scared about the wrong things and not thinking enough about what the real implications will be. I want that book.
enkiv2 9y ago
It's kind of amazing that we're at a point where "Rodney Brooks understands more about AI than Elon Musk" is news, but here we are. The power of PR is incredible.

28 points by ehudla 9y ago

This is getting absurd. An interview with Dr. Rodney Brooks, one of the great minds working in CS and robotics, has to spend time rebutting uninformed claims and fear mongering about AI research. There is so much Brooks can teach us. I look forward to reading his book.

cs2818 9y ago

Really glad to hear this perspective. Over the past seven years most of my time has been spent in robotics research labs, and I really struggle to reconcile the state of research with the concerns of those like Elon Musk. I think a series of discussions between the major figures on each side of this would be really valuable.

Houshalter 9y ago

And Brooks doesn't understand Musk. He's not saying current AI is a threat. He's talking about the very long term future. What AI will be like in 30 years, or even further. Its inevitable we will eventually solve AI. And when that day comes it will be dangerous. How easy do you think it is to control a being thousands of times smarter than you? If it was invented today we would have no ability to control it. Our best AI control mechanisms are just pressing a button to reward or punish it for it's behavior. You can't imagine any way that would fail? Our slightly larger brains made the difference between swinging in trees and walking on the moon. But we are only the very first intelligence to evolve. Its unlikely we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible. And this will likely happen in our lifetimes. The median expected date estimated by AI researchers is in the 2040s. Sure they can't possibly predict it very well, but who else can? And there is something to the wisdom of crowds.

cbames89 9y ago
Why is super-human general AI inevitable? Do you have references for this 2040 date? I'd love to see who's making this prediction.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  Because there's nothing magical about the human brain. Evolution created it through just dumb mutation and selection. Under a bunch of ridiculous constraints. Like it had to use less than 10 watts of power, and weigh only a handful of pounds, and it had to be made of meat, and could only be iteratively improved from whatever happened to work at guiding locomotion in fish, etc. Our current transistor tech is already orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and more efficient than neurons. There's no reason to expect the software stats of the brain are much better. Here's one survey: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    Interestingly, about 18% of the researchers said "never", but these answers didn't influence the posted CIs. Any reasonable imputation (say, "never = 2350") would both stretch those intervals by a lot and still underestimate the expert consensus.
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      They did account for them in the median AFAIK. Which is the number I gave and the most appropriate metric. I don't see any mention of confidence intervals mentioned in the survey, so what are you talking about? Means and standard deviation are given. But they are mostly useless as the distribution is very skewed. They would be infinite if the "never" people were included of course.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    The problem isn't just emulating the IQ of a typical human brain - which is a low bar, for the most part - but creating a transcendentally smart general intelligence. Considering that we still have many issues with basic computing - not least working out how to write code that works reliably without constant manual updates - the suggestion that we're going to start building self-improving crash-proof hyperbrains any time soon is wishful thinking. Realistically, we don't have the first clue how to start solving that problem. As of 2017 "Throw deep learning at it" is more of a fashion statement than a practical solution.

tbabb 9y ago

This guy is smart, and dead on: - People who don't understand AI are afraid of it; those who do know how fragile and limited it is. - The call for "regulation" of technology that doesn't exist is too vague to be useful. - It's the AI in self-driving cars which has the most potential to immediately kill/save thousands of people, and it's telling that it's not this technology that Elon seems to be calling to be regulated. Whether or not regulation is the right thing to do, any argument for/against regulation of self-driving cars could be applied just the same to a hypothetical super AI, but the former is tied to real, practical problems which exist today. Brooks clearly knows what's up. Also, to add my own commentary: - The dystopian robot future we should all be afraid of is not the [paperclip maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) Musk and friends wave their arms about, but marketing/business algorithms that have ripple effects at the scale of societies-- the Facebook, YouTube, and Google ranking algorithms are examples of this. We could shortly be in a place where large scale human behavior is shaped by algorithms with more data and insight about collective human behavior than any single human could have, and it will be used to optimize for money making instead of stability, fairness, or cultural values. Some society-shaping decisions/policies could even be made without any human awareness of the reasoning behind them. This is not less scary if they're being made by fragile/flaky algorithms.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Exactly. Our lack of awareness of political, social, and economic consequences is far more of a problem than any hypothetical paperclip demon. AI isn't terrifying. AI built with our current values is an horrific prospect.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cirgue 9y ago
  You don't need AI to have a paperclip demon. You just need complex systems that impact people's lives and aren't well understood. Capitalism is arguably the example of the paperclip deamon, and that will not get better with the permeation of sophisticated, fragile, poorly tuned machine learning techniques.

cbames89 9y ago

Does anyone else find it telling that at the same time Musk called for regulation, Steve the security robot is raging across the internet? http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/18/537905142/when-robot-face-plants-in-fountain-onlookers-show-humanity-by-gloating?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170718 http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/18/537905142/...

Aron 9y ago

To me, Elon is playing catch-up and thrown his hat in the Yudkowsky club although Bostrom and other more credentialled people were probably his vector into it. They were talking about this stuff 10-20 years ago. I haven't yet seen anything where Elon moves the ball forward conceptually, although he's a doer so he's not messing around with writing futurism documents and nitpicking details of rationality that almost no one is actually capable of implementing. On the other hand, Brooks doesn't show any indication he knows what Musk is talking about and throws out a bad summary of his position. I got nothing from this article except a slightly lower respect for Brooks. The real minds to watch IMO is the Hinton + Deep Mind crew, and I think Yudkowsky and the fearmongers are largely correct, or at least correct enough to be taken seriously. I don't think people following the meme 'real AI researchers know that AI is limited and fragile' are on the right track. So that's my bias.

latently 9y ago
"On the other hand, Brooks doesn't show any indication he knows what Musk is talking about" Not quite true: "Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon?"

natch 9y ago

People who think they understand AI don't understand AI. Which I think is a big part of Elon's point. So criticizing Elon this way is rich.

borplk 9y ago

"AI" is the "flying cars" of our generation.

anth1988 9y ago

I think he understands fine, but he likes getting his name out there as an AI alarmist more. > Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon? By the way, let’s talk about regulation on self-driving Teslas, because that’s a real issue. hahaha This interview should be required reading for everyone who wants to talk about AI. > It’s why I’m right now writing a book on AI and robotics and the future — because people are getting too scared about the wrong things and not thinking enough about what the real implications will be. I want that book.

enkiv2 9y ago

It's kind of amazing that we're at a point where "Rodney Brooks understands more about AI than Elon Musk" is news, but here we are. The power of PR is incredible.